Although it is the largest majority-Muslim country in the world, Indonesia has not
loomed large in public awareness of the Islamic world. Indeed, the worlds
fourth-largest country has barely made a mark on American public consciousness at all.

Only during the early years of the Vietnam War did the mainstream news media,
reflecting the governments fear of falling dominos, provide regular coverage of
Indonesia. Coverage picked up briefly in the aftermath of the Indonesian invasion of East
Timor in late 1975. In the years that followed, periodic massacres by Indonesian troops
and the appeals of East Timors Roman Catholic spiritual leader, Bishop Carlos Belo,
prevented the East Timor story from falling into complete obscurity. News on both Timor
and Indonesia increased exponentially, however, after Indonesias president, B.J.
Habibie, announced in January 1999 that Indonesia would allow the East Timorese to decide
their fate in an August referendum.

Well before the vote, violence broke out in areas of East Timor, as pro-Indonesian
militias sought to intimidate independence supporters. Although the BBC and several other
news organizations reported on the worst of these incidents, few observers were prepared
for the maelstrom of destruction that swept East Timor in early September, after it was
announced that almost 80 percent of the East Timorese had voted for independence. In full
view of United Nations observers and, before they were driven from the countryside,
Western reporters, the militias sprang into action. They burned most of East Timors
towns, killed hundreds of independence supporters, and forced 200,000 people into refugee
camps in the Indonesian province of West Timor.

As they scrambled to explain the enormity of this tragedy, a few Western reporters
speculated that the scale of the violence might be related to the fact that some 88
percent of Indonesians are Muslim while more than 90 percent of East Timorese are Roman
Catholic. Aided by excellent early reports by the BBC and CNN, however, most of the
Western media avoided the suggestion that the violence had anything to do with Islam.

A September 13 story in the London Daily Telegraph made the trenchant
observation that the militia members targeting church institutions in East Timor were
themselves primarily recruited from Catholic families. On September 18, CNN Worldview
carried an interview with Dr. Jeffrey Winters of Northwestern University in which he
asserted that "religion has virtually nothing to do with this." And in its
September 20 issue, U.S. News and World Report reported that the violence was
directed not just at the Timorese but at Indonesias next head of state. The armed
forces message was: "Suharto was a puppet master, but youre a
puppet." In these and other instances, the Western press deserves praise for
resisting stereotypes of Islam and Muslim politics as motivated by an eagerness to
extirpate other faiths.

Yet there was a downside to the medias balanced portrayal of Islam in the Timor
tragedy. In correctly concluding that Muslim interests had little to do with the militia
violence, the media overlooked the very important, if more complex and contradictory,
religious interests at play in the conflict. These less familiar aspects of the tragedy
shed critical light on the ongoing struggle for democracy in Indonesia.

The first irony of the East Timor tragedy is that the man responsible for organizing
the occupation of this now overwhelmingly Catholic territory was himself a Catholic.
Although President Suharto was responsible for the initial decision to invade East Timor
(having received tacit approval of his plan from U.S. officials), the actual architect of
the 1975 invasion was a stern army general known as Benny Moerdani. The most powerful of
commanders to serve under Suharto, Moerdani is a conservative Javanese Catholic and the
only one among Suhartos army chiefs who was non-Muslim. Still today, Muslim
hardliners blame Moerdani for what they regard as the "anti-Islamic" bias in the
armed forces during the 1970s and 1980s. They accuse the Catholic commander of denying
promotions to pious Muslims and portraying Islam as an enemy of the state. The charge has
a grain of truth, but it overlooks the fact that, to the degree that such policies
existed, they enjoyed Suhartos full support. Although nominally Muslim, during his
first 20 years in power Suharto regarded political Islam as the number-one threat to his
power.

The second irony in this story relates to the cultural change that took place in East
Timor as the Indonesian occupation dragged on. In 1975, the East Timorese population was
only about 35-40 percent Catholic. Aside from a few Muslims in coastal towns, most of the
non-Christian population practiced ancestral and ethnic religions. Most of the troops sent
to Timor by Indonesian authorities, however, were Muslim. So too were most of the poor
Indonesian migrants who came to Timorese towns in search of a better life. The result was
that indigenous Timorese came to identify Indonesians and the occupation with Islam. This
perception had a galvanizing effect on Timorese society. By the early 1990s, the
proportion of Timorese professing to be Catholic had surged to more than 90 percent.
Equally important, the Church and its reform-minded bishop had become key symbols of
Timorese resistance to the Indonesian occupation. Although their military campaign dealt
crippling blows to the armed resistance, the Indonesians unwittingly strengthened the role
of the Church as a symbol of Timorese self-determination.

The curious intermingling of Indo-nesian and Timorese religious destinies did not end
there. In the final years of his rule, Suharto had a change of heart toward Islam. After
General Moerdani complained to the president about the avarice of his children, Suharto
resolved to punish his insolent commander by building a new base of support outside of the
military. He was aware that in the 1980s an Islamic revival had swept Indonesian society.
Always on the lookout for challenges to his rule, Suharto was also alarmed to see that
many young Muslims had interpreted Islam as consistent with the call for constitutional
democracy and human rights. Between 1989 and 1996, then, Suharto sought to split the
Muslim community, rallying conservative Muslims to his side while vilifying pro-democracy
Muslims as "secularists," "Westernizers," and "liberals."

Suharto also reorganized the military during these years. He removed Moerdani
supporters from key posts and, for the first time ever in Indonesian history, promoted
hardline Islamists to the strategic command. When, in 1995, anti-Indonesian riots broke
out in East Timors capital, presidential propagandists portrayed the violence not as
the result of Indonesian oppression, but of Vatican and Western meddling.
Ultra-conservative Muslims rallied to the presidents side, calling for jihad
against independence fighters in East Timor, now portrayed not merely as anti-Indonesian
but anti-Islamic.

Remarkably, however, Suhartos attempt to cultivate an ultraconservative
constituency never won the hearts and minds of most Muslims. Hard-line supporters of the
dictator remained a small minority in the Muslim community. Conversely, the pro-democracy
movement that gained momentum after the Asian economic crisis in 1997 recruited most of
its supporters from the ranks of young Muslims. Faced with this challenge, Suharto
supporters only intensified their hateful propaganda against Chinese and Christian groups
during 1997 and 1998, to disastrous effect. In the last two years of Suhartos rule,
some 400 Christian churches were damaged or destroyed and thousands of Chinese shops
burned. The Western media carried few reports on either this low-intensity violence or the
regime propaganda against Chinese and Christians. In May 1998, Suhartoist hardliners
orchestrated riots in the capital in which more than 100 Chinese women were hunted down
and raped. Most in the Muslim community were outraged by this vile abuse of their
religion. Muslim revulsion against the violence was a key influence on Suhartos
decision to step down on May 21, 1998.

The man who replaced Suharto as president, Vice President B.J. Habibie, sought to
distance himself from his heavy-handed predecessor. Habibies announcement of the
East Timorese referendum was part of this effort to give the heirs to the ancien
régime a kinder and gentler face. But from early on, Habibies plan encountered
fierce opposition. The military command in particular was outraged that it had not been
consulted before Habibie made his decision. Several weeks after the announcement, military
officials initiated actions openly defiant of the president. They funneled money and arms
to pro-Indonesian militias, and laid the groundwork for the militias consolidation
of power. When, in the aftermath of the August referendum, militia violence swept across
the province, the military portrayed it as the "spontaneous" result of local
tensions, denying that the armed forces had played a role. This propaganda backfired
because, benefiting from first-rate news coverage, the outside world knew better. Under
U.N. and Western pressure, then, the Indonesian authorities were forced to let East Timor
go.

The final and most bitter irony of the East Timor tragedy is that the violence has had
a corrosive impact on Indonesias own fragile efforts at democratic reform. The
failure in East Timor only stiffened the militarys anti-democratic resolve. Startled
by U.N. calls for investigations of human-rights abuses, key generals in the military
concluded in late 1999 that further democratization would only lead to human-rights
prosecutions. The ascent of military hard-liners has also put new wind in the sails of
anti-democratic Muslims. Having backed Suharto in 1998, these conservatives had been
discredited in the eyes of most Indonesians.

In the elections of June 1999, parties representing hardline Muslims earned less than
10 percent of the vote. By the end of the year, however, the hardliners had acquired a new
lease on life by aligning themselves with military opponents of political reform.

In October 1998, one of the heroes of the Muslim democratic movement, Abdurrahman
Wahid, was elected president. Since beginning his political career in the early 1980s,
Wahid has been a champion of religious pluralism, a pioneer of womens rights, and a
fierce critic of Suhartos authoritarianism. Suharto responded to this defiance by
attempting to drive Wahid from the leadership of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the largest of
Indonesias Muslim social organizations. It is widely believed that, after failing in
this effort, Suharto secretly organized riots in several Wahid strongholds, in an effort
to show the NU rank-and-file that there was a price to be paid for independence.

In capturing the presidency, Wahid beat out the daughter of Indonesias first
president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, whose primary base of support came from Indonesias
secular and Christian communities. Once inaugurated, however, Wahid made his reformist
intentions clear. He appointed Megawati vice-president, called for investigations into
human-rights abuses, and reached out to the battered Chinese community. But lacking
military backing, he has had to move cautiously in his efforts to reform the armed forces,
a handicap that some outsiders have mistakenly perceived as a lack of will. In a two-hour
conversation with me in November 1999, Wahid made clear that he considers the reform of
the military a number-one condition for the consolidation of democracy in Indonesia.

Events of recent months have revealed the scale of the challenge he faces. Since
December 1999, the nation has witnessed an explosion of "ethnic" and
"religious" violence in the capital and, most tragically, the remote Maluccan
islands in eastern Indonesia. In the first five days of the new millennium alone, violence
between Christian and Muslim villagers in Maluccu took, by official estimates, more than
2,000 lives. Most were killed in well-coordinated massacres carried out by armed militias.

Since this is taking place far from the gaze of Indonesian and Western journalists, no
one can prove who is sponsoring these criminals. However, political observers in Jakarta
are convinced that, as in East Timor, the violence has been directed by anti-reform
elements in the now deeply divided military. Hardline military commanders dismiss these
charges, once again claiming that the killings are the result of "spontaneous"
emotions and "local" grievances. They assert that Wahid himself is ineffective
as a leader and is therefore to blame for the violence. Meanwhile, despite repeated
presidential appeals, military officials have failed to arrest even a single leader of the
violence.

Equally alarming, pro-military Muslims have taken advantage of the governments
inability to contain the crisis and have appealed for jihad against Christian
Maluccans. Brazenly defying President Wahids instructions, the conservatives have
opened jihad offices in major cities across Indonesia, recruiting Muslim youth
for battle against Christians.

The violence in East Timor during 1999 was, then, actually part of a larger and ongoing
drama. Faced with the threat of democratic reform, ancien-régime hardliners in
Indonesia have unleashed wave after wave of violence. Their current aim is to show that
civilians in general, and President Wahid in particular, are incapable of governing
Indonesia. The violence is all the more unfortunate in that it is occurring in a country
where the majority of Muslims have just proved their democratic mettle. Democratic Muslims
were united in rejecting Suhartos anti-Chinese and anti-Christian provocations, and
rejected the claim that the East Timorese struggle for independence was invented by
Westerners so as to humiliate Muslim Indonesia. Now, however, out of range of Western
cameras, a campaign of equally horrific violence is being carried out. The countrys
fragile democratic achievements are in jeopardy, as is the effort to forge a civil and
democratic Islam.

The democratic struggle in East Timor and Indonesia has been deeply affected by
religious change in both societies. Catholic conversion in East Timor became, among other
things, a means of refuge and resistance against Indonesian rule. For many Indonesian
Muslims, the Islamic revival lent moral weight to the demand for democratization, human
rights, and the rule of law. For others, a minority, the revival became a tool with which
to leverage a conservative defense of the political status quo. In covering Indonesia, the
media would do well to captureand convey to the worldthis complex play of
religious forces. In East Timor, the whole world was watching, and it made a difference.
The medias coverage of the contest of religious visions in Indonesia may also help
determine the fate of one of the worlds most important countries.